We are all people - inside and out, we are still just people! Cut me, and I will bleed as red as any black man, yellow child, brown woman, or orange cat. O Positive blood is O Positive blood. Only the smallest minds will ask, in the wake of a tragic accident, if the blood was donated by someone with the same skin color. Biblical scholars will declare that "God created Man in His image. Male and Female He created them." So? Is God white, or black? Is Santa Clause really a fat white man in a red suit and is the Tooth Fairy just a bucktoothed homosexual?

I actually do happen to know what God looks like, and we are all spitting images (but this can only be seen from the inside out). God, like most of us, likes diversity. How boring life would be if we all were the same height, had the same skin color, and our hair was never allowed to be different. Each time I go to work, they know they can expect to see some shade of red hair, but they never know if it will be parted on the left, the right, or down the middle and they have even seen me in modified pigtails before! Living in a corporeal body can be challenging enough - just imagine if we could not have the diversity of different body shapes, sizes and colors. Everyone would be my "type"!

I saw the image of God that is the “Who I am”, the night I decided to leave my psychologically abusive husband of more than 20 years. I’d been asleep for only two hours when he woke me to ask me where the love letters were from not one, but seven lovers he suspected me of keeping. Trying to rub the nightmare from my eyes, I thought he meant the love letters he’d written to me when we were in high school together. When I realized that he was psychotically serious, I knew that no amount of reasoning would work with him- not this time. This time, he was accusing me of infidelity, not wondering why my recent diet had brought only a two pound loss in a week, rather than the 15 he would have preferred. This time, I was suspected of breaking my most sacred of vows, not just of calling my own mother without his knowledge, or mis-balancing the checkbook. There is no way to reason with him this time. He was a man obsessed with a his suspicion that he was certain was indeed, a truth.

I was not going to lie to him. I was not going to placate him with comforting words or assurance. I had to evade him and his barrage of feather-light brow beating. I wanted only to run away, but since his burly body had me pinned to a corner of the couch, all I could do was pray for a way out. I prayed for insanity, because I felt that only if I was as crazy as he was, could I understand his way of thinking. I also thought that if I could be admitted to a caring institution for “crazy people” the pain I’d been feeling in my heart for more than ten years would magically disappear, but God had other ideas for me. I begged for insanity. I pleaded for peace. I cried in sheer desperation and helplessness, something I had grown accustomed to in my marriage.

But, when I called out for help from my Creator, I saw something that is so amazing that I still revel in the glory of it all. I saw the Biblical meaning of “God created Man in His image – Male and Female, He created them”. Before I saw the image of the “Who I am”, I heard a voice that was audible only to my heart, but resounded in every cell of my body. I heard, “Mary, that is not what I want for you and that is not what you want for you. Come to Me and I will give you the strength you need”. When I said a simple “Okay,” I could see myself as I truly was at that point, spiritually; I could also see the spirit of the man I had married in my youth. Spiritually, I was dried up and withered, like a leaf in winter, waiting for the inevitable crush that would turn me into dust. He, on the other hand, was dancing and singing of his power over me. I must have said aloud, “God, help me!” because then I heard a man that I thought had loved me snarl that he was the only one in our home who served the one true god. That’s when I got really scared.

I shuddered, “Oh God! Help me!” Then I had a vision of crystals made out of nothing but a Father’s love for His child in pain. They seemed to fall from the ceiling and formed an interlocking circular wall of light. I heard the voice call me over to the enclosure and as I stepped in with my spirit, the wall closed around me, creating a protective barrier. My husband pulled away with a gasp of pain, though nothing had touched him. I watched in awe as I saw my once timid, crumbling spirit return to what it was meant to be: created in God’s image. I saw a vision of something so wonderful that earthly words will not adequately convey its glory. I saw beams of light in every imaginable color and some colors I had never dreamed of imagining! These beams came from every possible direction, illuminating my once withered spirit and reviving my hope. I saw the beams of light, which are really beams of God’s love; all merge in a central point, creating a blinding, brilliant white light. Anyone who has ever studied basic art concepts or elementary science will concur that when white light shines through a prism or through water vapor like a rainbow, the white light is broken apart into all the colors. That is what we all are – all the colors – and in the Image of God, we are all one color, the color of love.

Does it really matter where we originated here on earth?Does it really matter if we originated in Ethiopia or in Finland?Does anyone really care that scientists have suggested that we all share the same DNA, regardless of origin, skin color, family history, or will to be different from “them”?

What matters is not our past, but our future. Where we came from is not as important as where we are going.